84 MUSICAL EVENTS A nother Orpheus Sings T HE composers Harrison Birtwistle, Peter Maxwell Da- vies, and Alexander Goehr, the pianist John Ogdon, and the trum- peter and conductor Elgar Howarth, students together at the Royal Manchester College of Music in the early fifties, for a while made up what was called the Manchester Group, whose contribution to the music of our day has been large. The composers soon pursued separate paths. MusIc has many mansions; there is no call to play favorites. But many peo- ple-increasingly many since the Birtwistle fifti- eth-birthday concerts and the appearance of the or- chestra] piece "Secret Theatre," in 1984-agree with Stephen Walsh's estimate of Birtwistle in the New Grove: "the most force- ful and uncompromisingly original British composer of his generation." Pierre Boulez has ever been his champi- on, in New York, London, and Paris. Birtwistle's orchestral piece "Earth Dances," given its first performance by the BBC Symphony earlier this year, was hailed as a new "Rite of Spring." His opera "The Mask of Orpheus," given its first performance last month by the English National Opera, was called by the critic of the London Times the second "perfectly satisfac- tory reinvention of opera since Stra- vinsky"-the first being Birtwistle's earlier opera, "Punch and Judy." His third opera, "Yan Tan Tethera," a pastoral tale (its title "one two three" in Pennine shepherds' numbering of their sheep), is to be produced in Lon- don in August. "The Mask of Orphe- us," billed for eight performances and a BBC broadcast, has been drawing full houses. Birtwistle's music is not easy to de- scribe. Varèse and Stravinsky are early influences on it, and then it goes its own way, owing nothing to exemplars or schools. Among its features are a fondness for monody, for a strong single line of discourse generating its particular harmonies and lending a protagonist-with-chorus aspect to many passages; a "gestural" kind of utterance which suggests sounds turned into shapes; and unhurried, de- liberate progress that calls for long- span listening and gives a processional " quality to severa] of the scores. But against the image of a score moving past the listener must be set that of a listener moving through the score. Some Birtwistle compositions are lik- ened to la.ndscapes, fixed in their fea- tures but revealing different views to the beholder-listener as he traverses them by different routes. Titles such as "An Imaginary Land- scape," "The Fields of Sorrow," and "Silbury Air" emphasize this anal- ogy, and the composer has often invoked it when talking about his work. Above all, there is a con- cern for structure which o places Birtwistle among the least "self-expressive" and most rational and ob- jective of composers. He would prob- ably assent to a Pythagorean view of music as numbers made manifest; numbers play a part in forming the features of many of his works. This does not mean that the music is sche- matic, or predictable in its progress. In Paul Griffiths' "New Sounds, New Personalities" (Faber )-conversations with twenty British composers of the nineteen-eighties- Birtwistle says: For "Secret Theatre" I drew up a lot of pre-compositional ideas about how things could progress, how they could get from point to point; I constructed a whole map, as it were. But then in the process of composition, in the journey, I went other wa ys. II .' \ f Similarly, in an interview that closes Michae] Hall's monograph "Harrison Birtwistle" the composer says: You can create a formal position before the event, an elaborate..schemata, and that you can call your idea. That's what you're trying to express. You have a duty to that schemata, a duty to that initial idea. But in the process of composition you make con- texts which are not necessarily concerned with it. Other things are thrown up which have a life of their own and are just as important. You now have a duty to two things. He tells of starting a work in a playful, improvisatory way: "That's how most of my pieces begin. I indulge my fan- tasies: I allow intuition to take over. . . . But intuition only takes you so far. After that you need a method of working which enables you to manip- ulate the material." He stresses a com- poser's responsibility to his material; likens himself to a dry-stone waller, finding the exact, fitting place for each piece of material that comes to hand, and to a medieval carver: "I carve the stone or the piece of wood to make the object I want, but there are elements in the material beyond my control. So the essential nature of the stone or the wood remains inviolate. It has a life of its own." One more significant quotation: "Everything I've written is a multiple object. What is shown at anyone time can only be a facet of it. I can never show its entirety." For further discus- sion of layers and levels, of pulses, of timbre, of fixed points and freedoms, and of the elusive notion of an "ideal" work whose features can be discovered and revealed only a few at a time, I recommend Mr. Hall's book. It appears in that valuable series The Contemporary Composers, published by Robson, and distributed here by Universe. But words alone cannot sug- gest what makes Birtwistle's music an adventure different in kind from any other. One must hear it Alas, although a fair amount of it has been recorded over the years no disks remain in the domestic catalogue. O RPHEUS is the incarnation of mu- sic's power over the souls and actions of men. The first operas, Peri's "Euridice" and Caccini's "Euridice " , and the first great opera, Monteverdi's "Orfeo," told of him. When opera was in need of reform, of a return to first princi pIes, Gluck retold the tale. Wagner gave Orphean attributes to two of his heroes, Tannhäuser and Walther von Stolzing. Stravinsky, Hans Werner Henze, and Elliott Carter are among the many later com- posers who have been inspired by thoughts of Orpheus. Like Apollo and Dionysus, whose myths are linked with his, he moves through Western music: a divinely inspired musician so eloquent and persuasive that none can resist him, yet a fallible mortal, unable to achieve his goal. The artist tri- umphs; the man falters, and loses his Eurydice. Faust, another type figure of Western art, embodies ambitious, as- pirant man. But Orpheus-Apollo's son, by some accounts-is a mediator between gods and men, and the foun- der of a religion whose followers called themselves children of the starry heavens and the fruitful earth. When Peter Hall, due to become the artistic co-director of Covent Garden, approached Birtwistle about an opera, in 1970, the composer at first consid- ered a "Faust." He was already at